With his post, Blum says that Collide has been under development for about a year. It’s an IDE, or integrated development environment, a tool for building software applications. But unlike traditional IDEs, it runs online, inside a web browser, fostering collaboration among coders and providing access to coding projects from virtually any machine. According to Blum — who left Google when the Atlanta operation was closed — only part of the code behind the tool has been open sourced, but he says this included the meat of the project.

“What we pushed out is extremely stripped down right now, but the most interesting tech stuff around collaborative editing is all there,” he says. “Long term, we hope it will serve as a catalyst for improving the state of web-based IDEs.”

Collide is just one of many tools that take the traditional IDE online in an effort to streamline code development. A startup called Cloud9 offers an online IDE based on the open source Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor, or ACE. Adobe has built an open source code editor called Brackets meant for building applications with standard web development languages, including HTML and Javascript. And the Eclipse project offers an open source tool called Orion, designed for those using the Java programming language.

Scott Blum. Image: Scott Blum

Using the code released by Google, you can set up your own online collaborative coding service. The code runs on a server, and then, when collaborating, individual developers tap into that server via their web browsers.

According to a post from a Microsoft engineer named Mohamed Mansour — who is already offering up a Collide service — Collide is built atop protocols originally designed for Google Wave, a failed Google project that was meant to replace email and instant messaging with a new breed of online communication.

Mansour praises Collide not because it allows for collaboration but because it gives you access to your latest development project from any machine you happen to be on. “The beauty of this is to do remote development/compilation/debugging,” he writes. “So if you’re on a cloud device like a Chromebook, tablets, or any remote location, you can still do partial work. It is still early, but if the development is active, this would be one promising tool for any developer. I know there are alternatives, but this is free and fully self hosted.”

Scott Blum was not immediately available for comment.

In his Google+ post, Blum said that Google has shut down its entire Atlanta engineering operation, but a Google spokesman tell us this is not the case, saying that the company still employees engineers in its Atlanta office. He says that the employee leading the operation left the web giant to set up his own company and that Google has “also made some internal changes on the technical side.”